5 WordPress Plugins to Increase Visitor Engagement

Content is not about you or your brand – it‘s about your visitors. It is your visitors who will discover, read, and share your content and it is your visitors who will define your online direction. Many businesses don‘t understand this, and as a result they publish content that‘s lacklustre onto a website which doesn‘t promote engagement.

To make the most of your content, you need to make it engaging – you might have the best-written article in the world that reveals something breaking but unless it has the right combination of quality and engagement, it‘s not going to go anywhere. The web has changed and visitors now expect to be able to interact with content with the click of a button or the touch of a screen.

It is the little things that make content more appealing to a visitor. Combine these, and you can create an experience for your visitors worth sharing.

Here‘s 5 WordPress plugins to increase your visitor engagement.

5. kk Star Ratings – link.

A star rating system for blog posts and pages is a great way to increase content interaction. kk Star Ratings is a free WordPress plugin that allows you to add star ratings to pages and posts automatically, or manually embed the rating through the WYSIWYG editor in WordPress. The best thing about this plugin is that it‘s rich snippet compatible, which means Google might show the star rating next to your search engine results. This could improve your click through rate. Extra features such as being able to make the rating system IP-protected means you can sit back and let your content get natural votes.

4. Magic Action Box – link.

Sometimes all content needs is a CTA. If your current WordPress theme doesn‘t support form integration, then Magic Action Box is a good solution. You can easily add action boxes before and after blog posts and pages with this plugin and it also integrates with Gravity Forms, a widely used form system on WordPress. The free version is good, but the Pro version is where it‘s at – you can create sales boxes, share boxes, custom CSS3 buttons, sidebar widgets, plus much more. I recommend this plugin for anybody who wants to increase the conversion potential of pages that struggle.

3. AddThis Smart Layers – link.

Chances are, your WordPress-powered website already has social buttons integrated. But how prevalent are they in your design? To get the most shares for your content, you need to give your visitor the best possible opportunity to do share. AddThis Smart Layers is a great solution. With this plugin you can add lots of extra functionality to your pages and posts, including floating vertical and horizontal buttons, along with recommended additional content boxes. This plugin is slick once integrated and it works extremely well on responsive websites.

2. Disqus – link.

By default WordPress has a basic commenting system which asks for a name and email address. This has been the standard comment system for blogs over the past twenty years, but it‘s not very modern in a world where Facebook and Twitter exist. Disqus is a cloud-based commenting plugin that replaces the WordPress commenting system. It allows users to comment immediately if they are signed in to Facebook, Twitter, or Google+, or set up a Disqus account with an e-mail address. The upshot of this system is that it promotes conversation and the comments are hosted in the cloud – not your server.

1. Comments Evolved – link.

If Disqus sounds like a great plugin to you, then Comments Evolved will too. This plugin adds Disqus functionality to your comment form as well as functionality for Facebook and Google+ comments and trackbacks. This is a fully featured commenting solution to get your visitors talking, but it isn‘t without its problems – developer support for this plugin is pretty slow and some features are missing, such as a decent CAPTCHA. This plugin is still in its early form since being rebranded from GPlus Comments, though, so it‘s a worthwhile investment as the features are very promising.